Department Q

On returning to my room and a change of clothing and time to view the last part of Strictly Come Dancing with some very good performances with one meriting 39 from 40 points, and the first hour of the X Factor before one off Danish Film Department Q. The Keeper of Lost Causes based on a book and which been followed by two other films although these are not to be shown. Watching the Saturday evening series in a language other than English has become an  important regular event in my life with Inspector Montalbano my favourite because of the intertwining of the love of Mediterranean food with his detective skill and the Young Montalbano series has also  been exceptional, similarly to the recreation of Moorse following the death of leading and irreplaceable action John Thaw, followed by the series from the books of Henning Mankell, the Detective Wallander, where Kenneth Branagh has also made brilliant English versions of the Detective and the Danish political series Borgen on Coalition government which ranks alongside the West Wing for the White House reality and the Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister series here in the UK. Romanzo Criminale and Corleone focussed on the Mafia and separate Roman criminal gangsterism with the Tunnel also being notable and meriting some writing to remind me of their experience

On Saturday evening 15^th October 2016 hoping to be engaged and taking away the disappointment of not being able to go and see a play at the National Theatre where I had bought an expensive ticket and the theatre was unable to give me a credit towards a future production. I watched Department Q in anticipation but conclude that there was something nasty about this work, perhaps because it came too close to the reality of the terror of what being imprisoned is like. Over the past year there has been a series of films about the taking of young women and keeping them for the sexual pleasure of one man with currently on BBC TV Missing and 13.

The one off of three films begins with interest when one of a team of three detectives is murdered, a second finds himself paralysed, the third who was also shot but survives to physically recover is relegated to permanently close the accumulation of cold cases and is appointed an enthusiastically Muslim with a taste for loud contemporary music. The sense of guilt and failure of the one who survives and the despair and frustration of second is immediately real, with the urge to get back to work understandable and the anger and frustration at being given a desk job and having to work with someone new and cannot possibly understand how one is feeling

The assistant selects the first batch of cases with a parade of photographs and which includes one, Carl, the reluctant boss knows something about the case of a young woman politician who is believed to have committed suicide disappearing from a ferry leaving her brother with what first appears to be severe learning difficulties from head injuries in a car accident which killed their parents.

The unravelling of what actually happened is thorough and clever and early on we learn that the young woman was in fact kidnapped and is being kept in a decompression chamber which limits the confined area and also enables the perpetrator to changing levels of physical unpleasantness. There is a credible method for of food and water dealing with sanitation and the provision of food and water but it stretches credulity that the woman is able to survive this limited environment for year upon year. The juxtaposition of being a witness to the horror and the brutality the young women experience and the difficulties the detectives face adds to the tension which the film creates and where it is clear that the motive for the imprisonment is not sexual but with the perpetrator insisting on having voyeuristic pleasures in her increasing discomfort making it plain he is seeking a prolonged painful death as the outcome but not why.

We learn that the perpetrator as boy was in a car travelling in the same direction as his prisoner who exchange looks as one of the cars overtakes the other, and he girl for some reason places her hand of the face of the person in front thus it is suggested causing the accident which kills parents, his sister and leads to physical and emotional condition of the girl’s brother who she now cares for. The boy is placed in a children’s home and portrayed as disruptive and violent, befriending another, who as an adult appears to have been a conference with the girl who has become a politician attends. At least this is the impression first gained as the detectives identify the friend as the likely suspect as he is identified as being on the ferry from which the woman disappeared, believed committed to suicide.

That the detectives commenced to find out what happened by going out of the basement into the field was never intended and opposed, particularly by the detective originally in charge of the investigation into the death. When it is established that the perpetrator has committed suicide over the side of a small boat, a fishing enthusiast, on a lake, the two are ordered to close the case and return to the others which the disobey and are suspended. Fortunately, they quickly discover that the dead man is not the perpetrator. Because they learn that the brother is more traumatised than physically damaged, the assistant who is a practicing Muslim, to provide the obligatory representative diversity now required has the temperament to sit with the young man until he is able to obtain responses to a collection of photographs taken at the political event and which include photos of the perpetrator. The breakthrough occurs when a witness does not identify the perpetrator as the man at the conference which the brother has identified from the photographs taken at the political event. It is at this point we understand that the perpetrator has killed his friend in order to switch identities to get to the conference after seeing a TV report of the girl as a budding politician.

It is at this point we are asked to accept another coincidence which challenges rationality, although nothing like the challenges posed by the film Inferno which I was to see the Sunday lunchtime. The perpetrator now lives in an isolated ramshackle farm assortment of buildings with his disabled mother who survived the crash but was unable to care for him as a child and where his father had work involving diving and a decompression chamber within the home. The detectives arrive do not accept the story that he is away from the mother and leave when Carl realises that the pile of petrol cans means that there is a generator which has been petrol power in order that the increase in energy use cannot be recorded but why would the authorities take an interest anyway for which there could be a number of legitimate reasons.

They return meet up with the perpetrator who at first denies and then puts up a desperate fight to complete the murder of his victim, wounding the assistant with a gunshot and almost killing Carl with a ligature. It is the assistant using extreme violence who stops and kills the assailant.  The woman survives maintained in a pressure container in an attempt to undo the adjustments to her body caused by the years of captivity in which despite the limitations of her confinement she has concentrated on remaining physically fit and sane. The two detectives are rewarded with medals and Carl told he can re-join his former team. He declines wanting to continue Department Q with the assistant and an assistant to administrative and secretarial help and no doubt to provide the female interest. For whatever unknown reason this did not become the ongoing TV series similar to Cold Case here in the UK, but there have been two other ones off films in successive years.  I can only assume this is because of the gratuitous violence used and the protracted voyeuristic scene making it more a film for the cinema than the TV.